Finding the Hatakes
by Silberias
Summary: If you want to be healed, go to Tsunade. If you want loyalty, go to Naruto. If you want both in the same place? Go find the Hatakes.


Something that started racketing around in my head. One of those "oohhh angst! They shall not let us be together!" fics.

Also: hooray how twisted history can get when you don't have a dedicated oral historian (in Africa, they have these oral history guru people who are like...history ninjas) in your clan! The second half is told from Sakura's granddaugther's grandaughter's POV.

Enjoy!

* * *

If one required advanced medical attention for something that could wait, one always wanted the Godaime Hokage, Tsunade of the Leaf. Long term debilitating ills or things requiring surgery were her specialties in curing.

If one required ultimate loyalty, unswerving devotion—the point of idiocy—and determination, one always wanted the Rokudaime Hokage, Uzumaki Naruto. Missions which required courage and an abject disregard for personal safety were his where his specialty for completing missions came in handy.

If one, however, required both, one had to search far and wide for aid. Because Tsunade lived with the Toad Sage deep within the forests surrounding the village of the Leaf, and Naruto lived in the very center of Konoha acknowledged by all as the most successful ninja to have ever come from the town. They were hard to get to if one needed both, because they were so far distant from one another.

One had to search because if one required ultimate devotion to duty and highly advanced medical skills—both for long-term things and for injuries requiring immediate attention—one had to find the Hatakes. They travelled slowly, but were extremely difficult to track. They had two children of their own and a fluctuating number of students travelling with them, but their camp sites left no trace and they rarely if ever went into established towns.

More often than not, a stream of single or doubled shinobi would appear in a town, each with random orders for the local store. Each would order, pay, and pick up their purchases—and leave. Never, however, did a silver haired man in his forties or a pink haired woman in her late twenties appear. The Hatakes were ghosts within the borders of Fire.

They had quietly left Konoha one night, with special dispensation from the Godaime, and never returned to the Leaf. Hatake Sakura—as of that night no longer Haruno—was seventeen and full of "bratspawn" as Tsunade termed it with affection which bordered on furious. The elders were making Hatake Kakashi leave the village, his name in disgrace. It was all well and good for anyone to date anyone in Konoha, but there were rules about when kunoichi were granted the right to have families, and the law stated that the father would be banned from the city while the mother was free to choose—to stay or follow him. Sakura chose to follow Kakashi rather than face single parenthood away from the man she loved.

The elders had felt keenly the loss of two of their best shinobi, and it had been decided that the Hatakes would become freelance instructors for Konoha. It became a student's own choice to study under the disgraced shinobi. It became a student's own choice to try to _find_ them and then pass their tests.

Although no evidence can be found to back up the statement, it is said that both of them still wear the symbol of the leaf on their foreheads and that their children (two boys with spiky silver hair) perform Academy-style taijutsu kata in time with the few (sometimes many) students who manage to find the Hatakes.

* * *

Hatake Sakura was named after her great-great-grandmother Sakura, a great ninja and the woman who every Hatake credits with the freedom of the clan. Freedom from the shinobi wars, from the clan strife, from the mission ranking systems and bureaucracy of the sprawling city of Konoha proper. The Hatakes are free to wander because Sakura chose to follow her husband when he was thrown out of the city by a vengeful Hokage—the sixth Hokage—he'd married the man's sister, after all, and he'd done it all very hush-hush.

According to Grandpa, it was only a month after he'd left that Sakura (the original one) had found she was carrying his child. It was her yearning desire to find him, to be with him, that had freed the clan which she would become the mother of. She'd slipped away into the forests and spent five months looking for Kakashi, getting slower and slower as her pregnancy progressed. She found him far from Konoha teaching five youngsters how to manipulate chakra, deep within the eastern part of the forests.

To be named after such a woman was a blessing and a curse—no kunoichi could hope to hold a candle to the legendary Sakura of the Forests, but it was a damned good incentive to try. Although Sakura was very glad that the clan had no rules or qualms about who married who, she looked forward to _not_ emulating the original Sakura's behavior.

* * *

Review? (I got the facts wrong in the second half on purpose)


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